by Andrea Wulf
‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,’ he later wrote in his book My First Summer in the Sierra. Again and again, Muir returned to this idea. As he wrote of ‘a thousand invisible cords’ and ‘innumerable unbreakable cords’, and of those ‘that cannot be broken’, he mulled over a concept of nature where everything was connected. Every tree, flower, insect, bird, stream or lake seemed to invite him ‘to learn something of its history and relationship’, and the greatest achievements of his first summer in Yosemite, he said, were ‘lessons of unity and inter-relation’.2
Muir was so enchanted by Yosemite that he returned many times and as often as he could over the next few years. Sometimes he stayed for months, other times just weeks. When he was not climbing, walking and observing in the Sierra, he took odd jobs – in the Central Valley, in the foothills of the Sierra or in Yosemite. He worked as a shepherd in the mountains, as a farm hand on a ranch and at a sawmill in Yosemite Valley. One season while he stayed in Yosemite, Muir built himself a small cabin through which a little stream flowed, gurgling a gentle lullaby at night. Ferns grew inside the cabin and frogs hopped along the floor – inside and outside were the same. Whenever he could, Muir disappeared to the mountains, ‘screaming among the peaks’.
In the Sierra the world became more and more visible, Muir said, ‘the farther and higher we go’. He noted and recorded his observations, he drew and collected but he also went to the mountaintops, higher and higher. He climbed from summit to canyon, from canyon to summit, comparing and measuring – assembling data to understand the creation of Yosemite Valley.
Unlike the scientists who at that time conducted the Geological Survey of California and who believed that cataclysmic eruptions had given birth to the valley, Muir was the first to realize that glaciers – slowly moving giants of ice – had carved it out over thousands of years. Muir began to read the glacial footprints and scars on the rocks. When he found a living glacier, he proved his theory of glacial motion in Yosemite Valley by placing stakes into the ice which moved several inches over a period of forty-six days. He had become completely ‘iced’, he explained. ‘I have nothing to send but what is frozen or freezable,’ he wrote to Jeanne Carr. And though Muir still wanted to see the Andes, he decided not to leave California as long as the Sierra ‘trust me and talk to me’.
In Yosemite Valley, Muir also thought about Humboldt’s concept of plant distribution. In spring 1872, exactly three years after his first visit, Muir sketched the migration of Arctic plants over thousands of years from the plains in the Central Valley up to the glaciers in the Sierra. His little drawing showed the position of the plants, he explained, ‘at the opening of the glacial springtime’ but also the location where they grew now, near the summit. It was a sketch that reveals its parentage in Humboldt’s Naturgemälde and Muir’s new understanding that botany, geography, climate and geology were tightly intermeshed.
Muir’s sketch showed the movement of Arctic plants over thousands of years. He gave three positions: in the plains ‘setting out on their journey up the mountains’; further up some were still ‘lingering’ and then near the summit, the ‘recent position of arctic plants – still journeying upward’ (Illustration Credit 23.1)
Muir enjoyed nature intellectually, emotionally and viscerally. His surrender to nature was, as he said, ‘unconditional’, and he happily ignored dangers. One evening, for example, he climbed on to a perilously high ledge behind the Upper Yosemite Fall to investigate what he thought might be a mark made by a glacier. He slipped and fell but somehow managed to hold tight to a small bit of protruding rock. As he crouched on the ledge behind the waterfall some 500 feet high, the relentless spray drove him against the wall behind him. He was soaking wet and almost in a trance. It was pitch dark by the time he scrambled down, but he was ecstatic – baptized, as he said, by the waterfall.
Muir was at ease in the mountains. He leapt across steep icy slopes ‘as surely as a mountain goat’, one friend said, and climbed up the highest trees. Winter storms were greeted with enthusiasm. When strong tremors shook Yosemite Valley and his little cabin in spring 1872, Muir ran outside, shouting, ‘A noble Earthquake!!!’ As huge granite boulders tumbled, Muir saw his mountain theories brought alive. ‘Destruction,’ he said, ‘is always creation.’ This was proper discovery. How could one find the truth of nature in a laboratory?
During these first few years in California, Muir wrote enthusiastic letters to his friends and family but also guided visitors through the valley. When Jeanne Carr, his old friend and mentor from his university days, moved to California from Madison with her husband, she introduced Muir to many scientists, artists and writers. He was easy to recognize, Muir wrote, visitors just had to look out for the ‘most suntanned and round shouldered and bashful man’. He welcomed scientists from across the States.
Respected American botanists Asa Gray and John Torrey came, as did geologist Joseph LeConte. Yosemite Valley was also becoming a tourist attraction and the numbers of visitors soon grew into the hundreds. In June 1864, three years before Muir first arrived, the US government had granted Yosemite Valley to the state of California as a park ‘for public use, resort and recreation’. As industrialization had picked up pace, more and more people were moving into cities and some began to feel the loss of nature in their lives. They now arrived in Yosemite on horses loaded with the comforts of civilization. With their gaudy clothes, Muir wrote, they were like colourful ‘bugs’ among the rocks and trees.
One visitor was Henry David Thoreau’s old mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had been encouraged by Jeanne Carr to seek out Muir. The two men spent a few days together during which Muir, who had just turned thirty-three, showed the almost seventy-year-old Emerson his sketches and herbarium, as well as the valley and his beloved sequoias in the Mariposa Grove. But Muir was deeply disappointed that instead of camping under the open sky, Emerson preferred to spend his nights in one of the log cabins in the valley where tourists could rent a room. Emerson’s insistence on sleeping indoors was a ‘sad commentary’, Muir said, on ‘the glorious transcendentalism’.
Emerson, though, was so impressed by Muir’s knowledge and love for nature that he wanted him to join the faculty at Harvard University where he himself had studied and still sometimes gave a lecture. Muir refused. He was too wild for the establishment on the East Coast, ‘too befogged to burn well in their patent, high-heated, educational furnaces’. Muir longed for the wilderness. ‘Solitude,’ Emerson warned him, ‘is a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife,’ but Muir was unmoved. He loved seclusion. How could he feel lonely when he was in a constant dialogue with nature?
It was a dialogue that worked on many levels. Like Humboldt and Thoreau, Muir had become convinced that in order to understand nature one’s feelings were as important as scientific data. Having initially set out to make sense of the natural world by ‘botanizing’, Muir had quickly realized how restricting such an approach might be. Descriptions of texture, colour, sound and smell became the trademarks of his articles and books which he would later write for a non-scientific audience. But in his letters and journals from his first years in Yosemite, Muir’s deeply sensual relationship with nature already leapt from almost every page. ‘I’m in the woods, woods, woods, & they are in me–ee–e,’ he wrote, or ‘I wish I was so drunk & Sequoical,’ transforming the sequoias’ strength into an evocative adjective.
The leaves’ shadows on a boulder were ‘dancing, waltzing in swift, merry swirls’ and the gurgling streams were ‘chanting’. Nature talked to Muir. The mountains were calling him to ‘Come higher’, while the plants and animals were shouting in the morning, ‘Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song. Come! Come!’ He spoke with waterfalls and flowers. In a letter to Emerson he described how he had asked two violets what they thought of the earthquake, and how they had replied, ‘It’s all Love.’ The world that Muir discovered in Yosemite was animated and
pulsating with life. This was Humboldt’s nature as a living organism.3
Muir wrote of the ‘breath of Nature’ and the ‘pulses of Nature’s big heart’. He was ‘part of wild Nature,’ he insisted. Sometimes he became so much one with nature that the reader is left guessing what he was referring to: ‘Four cloudless April days filled in every pore & chink with unsoftened undiluted sunshine’ – Muir’s pores and chinks, or those of the landscape?
What had been an emotional response for Humboldt also became a spiritual dialogue for Muir. Where Humboldt had seen an internal force of creation, Muir found a divine hand. Muir discovered God in nature – but not a God who reverberated from the church pulpits. The Sierra Nevada was his ‘mountain temple’, in which the rocks, plants and the sky were the words of God and could be read like a divine manuscript. The natural world opened ‘a thousand windows to show us God’, Muir had written during his first summer at Yosemite Valley, and every flower was like a mirror reflecting the Creator’s hand. Muir would preach nature like an ‘apostle’, he said.
Muir was not only in conversation with nature and God but also with Humboldt. He owned copies of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, Views of Nature and Cosmos – all heavily annotated with hundreds of Muir’s pencil marks. He read with great interest about the indigenous tribes that Humboldt had encountered in South America and who regarded nature as sacred. Muir was fascinated by Humboldt’s descriptions of those tribes who punished the ‘violation of these monuments of nature’ severely and those who had ‘no other worship than that of the powers of nature.’ Their god was in the forest just like Muir’s. When Humboldt wrote about the ‘sacred sanctuaries’ of nature, Muir turned it into the ‘sanctum sanctorum of the Sierras’.
Muir’s own index on the back page of his copy of Humboldt’s Views of Nature. He listed subjects such as ‘influences of forests’ and ‘forests & civilization’, noting the pages that dealt with the impact of trees on climate, soil and evaporation as well as the destructive force of agriculture and deforestation (Illustration Credit 23.2)
So obsessed was Muir that he even highlighted the pages that referred to Humboldt in his Darwin and Thoreau books. One topic that particularly fascinated Muir – as it had George Perkins Marsh – was Humboldt’s comments on deforestation and the ecological function of forests.
As he observed the world around him, Muir realized that something had to be done. The country was changing. Every year Americans claimed an additional 15 million acres for fields. With the advent of steam-powered reapers, grain binder machines and combine harvesters that cut, threshed and cleaned grains mechanically, agriculture had become industrialized. The world seemed to spin faster and faster. In 1861 communication had become almost instantaneous when the first transcontinental telegraph cable connected the whole of the United States from the Atlantic coast in the east to the Pacific coast in the west. In 1869, the year of Muir’s first summer in Yosemite and also the year that the world celebrated the centenary of Humboldt’s birth, the first transcontinental railway in North America reached the West Coast. Over the past four decades the railway boom had transformed America and during Muir’s first five years in California another 33,000 miles of tracks were added – by 1890 more than 160,000 miles of tracks snaked across the United States. Distances seemed to shrink in tandem with the wilderness. There was soon no more land to be conquered and explored in the American West. The 1890s were the first decade without a frontier. ‘The rough conquest of the wilderness is accomplished,’ the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner would declare in 1903.
The railway not only provided fast access to remote places but also drove the standardization of ‘railway time’ which would bring four time zones to America. Standard time and watches replaced the sun and the moon as a way to measure out lives. Humankind, it seemed, controlled nature and Americans were in the vanguard. They had land to till, water to harness and timber to burn. The whole country was building, ploughing, churning and working. With the rapid spread of the railway, goods and grain could be transported easily across the huge continent. By the end of the nineteenth century the United States was the world’s leading manufacturing country, and as farmers moved into the cities and towns, nature became increasingly removed from daily life.
In the decade after his first summer in Yosemite, Muir turned to writing to ‘entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness’. As he composed his first articles, he studied Humboldt’s books as well as Marsh’s Man and Nature and Thoreau’s The Maine Woods and Walden. In his copy of The Maine Woods he underlined Thoreau’s call for ‘national preserves’ and began to think about the protection of the wilderness. Humboldt’s ideas had come full circle. Not only had Humboldt influenced some of the most important thinkers, scientists and artists but they in turn inspired each other. Together, Humboldt, Marsh and Thoreau provided the intellectual framework through which Muir saw the changing world around him.
For the rest of his life Muir fought for the protection of nature. Man and Nature had been a wake-up call for some Americans, but where Marsh wrote one book that encouraged the protection of the environment mainly for the economic profit of the country, Muir would publish a dozen books and more than 300 articles that made ordinary Americans fall in love with nature. Muir wanted them to stare in awe at mountain vistas and towering trees. He could be funny, charming and seductive in his pursuit of this goal. Muir took the baton of nature writing from Humboldt who had created this new genre – one that combined scientific thinking with emotional responses to nature. Humboldt had dazzled his readers, including Muir, who then in turn became a master of this kind of writing. ‘Nature’ itself, Muir said, was ‘a poet’ – he just needed to let it speak through his pen.
Muir was a great communicator. He had the reputation of being an incessant talker – bursting with ideas, facts, observations and his joy for nature. ‘Our foreheads felt the wind and the rain,’ one friend commented after listening to Muir’s stories. His letters, journals and books were equally passionate, packed with descriptions that transported the reader into the woods and mountains. On one occasion, when he climbed a mountain with Charles Sargent, the director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, Muir was amazed how a man so learned about trees could be so untouched by the magnificent autumnal scenery. While he was jumping around and singing to ‘glory in it all’, Sargent stood ‘cool as a rock’. When Muir asked him why, Sargent replied, ‘I don’t wear my heart upon my sleeve.’ But Muir was not allowing Sargent to get away with this. ‘Who cares where you wear your little heart, man,’ Muir countered, ‘there you stand in the face of all Heaven come down to earth, like a critic of the universe, as if to say “Come, Nature, bring on the best you have: I’m from BOSTON.” ’
Muir lived and breathed nature. One early letter – a love letter to sequoias – was written in ink that Muir had made from their sap, and his scrawl still shines in the red of the sequoia’s sap today. The letterhead stated ‘Squirrelville, Sequoia Co, Nut time’ – and on he goes: ‘The King tree & me have sworn eternal love.’ When it came to nature, Muir was never afraid of letting go. He wanted to preach to the ‘juiceless world’ about the forest, life and nature. Those defrauded by civilization, he wrote, those ‘sick or successful, come suck Sequoia & be saved’.
Muir’s books and articles exuded such a playful joy that he inspired millions of Americans, shaping their relationship with nature. Muir wrote of ‘a glorious wilderness that seemed to be calling with a thousand songful voices’ and of trees in a storm that were ‘throbbing with music and life’ – his language was visceral and emotional. He grabbed his readers and took them into the wilderness, up snowy mountains, above and behind stupendous waterfalls and across flowering meadows.4
Muir liked to cast himself as the wild man in the mountains. But after his first five years in rural California and the Sierra, he began to spend the winter months in San Francisco and the Bay Area to write his articles. He rented rooms from friends and acquaintances and continue
d to dislike the city’s ‘barren & beeless’ streets, but here he met the editors who commissioned his first pieces. Throughout these years he remained restless, but as his brothers and sisters wrote letters from Wisconsin, reporting on their marriages and children, Muir began to think about his future.
It was Jeanne Carr who introduced him to Louie Strentzel, in September 1874, when Muir was thirty-six. Louie was twenty-seven and the only surviving child of a wealthy Polish emigrant who owned a large orchard and vineyard in Martinez, thirty miles north-east of San Francisco. For five years Muir wrote her letters, and regularly visited Louie and her family, before he finally made up his mind. They became engaged in 1879, and married in April 1880, a few days before his forty-second birthday. They settled at the Strentzels’ ranch in Martinez – but Muir continued to escape into the wilderness. Louie understood that she had to let her husband go when he felt ‘lost & choked in agricultural needs’. Muir always returned, refreshed and inspired, ready to spend time with his wife and later his two young daughters whom he adored. Only once did Louie accompany him to Yosemite Valley where Muir pushed her up the mountains with a stick pressed to her back – to his mind a helpful gesture, but it was an experiment that was never repeated.
Muir’s sketch of pushing Louie up a mountain in Yosemite (Illustration Credit 23.3)
Muir accepted his role as farm manager but never enjoyed it. Then, when Louie’s father died in 1890, he left her a fortune of almost US $250,000. They decided to sell parts of the land and hired Muir’s sister and her husband to run the remaining estate. Muir, who was now in his early fifties, was glad to be relieved of the daily work on the ranch so that he could concentrate on more important issues.
During the years that he had run the Strentzels’ ranch in Martinez, Muir never lost his passion for Yosemite. Encouraged by Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of the nation’s leading literary monthly magazine, the Century, Muir began to fight for the wilderness. Every time he visited Yosemite Valley he saw more changes. Though the valley was a state park, the enforcement of regulations and control was lax. California was managing Yosemite Valley badly. Sheep had grazed the valley floor barren and tourist accommodation cluttered the landscape. Muir also noted how many wildflowers had disappeared since he had first visited the Sierra two decades earlier. In the mountains, outside the boundaries of the park, many of Muir’s beloved sequoias had been felled for timber. Muir was shocked about the destruction and waste – and would later write that ‘no doubt these trees would make good lumber after passing through a sawmill, as George Washington after passing through the hands of a French cook would have made good food’.5